Sketchnote Book Club and the Power of Pink Sheets

Issue #12 of Simply Sketched

The whole reason I got into sketchnoting was because I wanted to be able to actually remember and put into practice the ideas that I read about in books. That’s why over the years I’ve enjoyed making visual summaries of books like Essentialism, Digital Minimalism, and The Power of Full Engagement.

Recently I decided to merge my interest in books with my passion for sketchnoting to create some month-long programs in which a group of us read a good book together while I teach you how to take visual notes from the ground up.

I’m calling it Sketchnote Book Club and I’ve already picked the first three books that we’ll be reading.

We’ll kick things off in just a few weeks with Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown.

So if you’d like to read and discuss a good book while learning how to sketch out the ideas within it, check out the program details. I’d love to see you there!

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To get a feel for my style of visual book summary, check out the latest one that I just published to the Verbal to Visual YouTube channel.

Here I’m sharing some of my favorite ideas from the book Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff:

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I owe the development of the new Sketchnote Book Club program to Pink Sheets, an approach to capturing and sharing ideas around a particular topic that my friend Benoit Leclair recently shared within Verbal to Visual.

The idea is to look at a single idea (a tip or a useful mindset or practice) from a variety of angles, from left brain to right brain and from abstract to specific.

Here’s the template (note that the page need not be pink - dig into the resources linked above for the backstory of the name):

The top section with models and metaphors is where you’ll find the most overlap with sketchnoting. I have appreciated the simple diagrams that make up some of the models that I’ve seen so far, like in this example from Pink Sheets creator Matt Church:

Here’s an example of a model that I’m working on, tentatively titled 2-D Thinking, that captures the full range of expression that you can achieve with visual notes:

That’s one of many models that I’m building, and if you’d like to see them in their entirety, that’s what I’ll be sharing in the upcoming Sketchnote Book Club events.

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Diagrams and drawings. That’s what it all boils down to.

I wish you luck in your mark-making and meaning-making endeavors this week.

Cheers,

-Doug